Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have released the first beta version of
Stack Overflow. This site provides a great new way to ask programming questions and find or get answers. As Joel
explains the current problem:
If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you
have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of
replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to
get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies
are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has
posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and
which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is
buried amongst a lot of dreck.
And Stack Overflow tries to solve this problem by leveraging web 2.0 technologies:
Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see
the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or
inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers
bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place
also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer,
but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other
answers.
Continue reading "Programmers Usenet 2.0" »
